Game Reviews

When I first got my hands on Sid Meier's Civilization V, my life became a fight. I don't mean I was struggling to guide my civilisation to global renown, languidly picking my way up the research tree, sending little men to die in little wars. It wasn't that kind of fight. I mean I was fighting not to click the icon that led to the game that led without fail or mercy to me entering a kind of strategy fugue, which I'd emerge from, hungry and dehydrated, between three and seven hours later. To say this game is addictive is like saying that dry toast is edible. Of course it is, but that's not the whole picture.

If you haven't played a Civilization game before, they have the grandest of all strategy concepts. You're given control of an entire race of people circa 4000 BC, and from a humble beginning caving in the heads of local barbarians you engineer your nation's success over whole millennia, eventually reaching a day-after-tomorrow technological level with Nanotech and (new with Civ V) Giant Death Robots. One of the more curious parts of Civ is the different ways you can win it. The Domination victory has been simplified with Civ V to "simply" holding the capitals of all the other civilisations. Then there's the Science victory, whereby you assemble the various parts of a spaceship and launch it; the Diplomatic victory, where your peaceful ass is voted to be head of the United Nations; and the Cultural victory, which in Civ V means using culture points to complete five social policy branches and then the 'Utopia Project'.